


overdraw

by sweetwatersong



Category: Hawkeye (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-29
Updated: 2015-01-29
Packaged: 2018-03-09 12:56:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3250478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetwatersong/pseuds/sweetwatersong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>verb,  -draws, -drawing, -drew, -drawn<br/>1. (transitive) Drawing the arrow beyond the face of the bow.<br/>2. (transitive) Drawing the bow to the point of maximum stress on its limbs. </p><p>He doesn't pick up his bow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	overdraw

He doesn't pick up his bow.

It sits there on the dresser like a challenge, like a choice, and sometimes his hands hurt so badly that Clint curls them into fists and tightens each knuckle until one pain trumps another. He sees it out of the corner of his eye every morning, faces it head on when he digs socks out of the top drawer or wrenches a t-shirt from the middle one, and in his stomach is the sick and angry feeling that churns and turns and doesn't let go. Doesn't relent.

Nobody else understands, but then again, nobody else knows. Who cares anymore about the guy in apartment #113B, with a battered door and scruffy beard, with tousled blond hair and lines under his eyes? It's like the world has forgotten him, moved on without him, the people he passes in the halls never giving him more than a distracted "Hello," or occasional nod. Outside New York City keeps bustling down its streets and he could walk along its heartlines, could walk a tightrope strung between the Empire State Building and the Lady with her illusion of liberty in the harbor, and no one would look twice.

No one would give a fuck.

And he thinks bitterly, grit in his stomach and tension through the line of his shoulders, that he likes it that way.

They cleaned up the rubble a long time ago, moving the bricks and mortar to a landfill with the barges he sees on the water, toiling steadily away with their burdens. It wasn’t a big scene, had nothing there now to tell the world what happened - what was lost - and the dust finished drifting off on the reeking breeze long before he came to terms with it. And the bow still sat on his dresser, left there because abandoning it in that shattered corner office would have been a betrayal he wasn't capable of, left there on the polished wood and gathering its own dust day by day.

If someone had the technology, had the time, they might be able to tell difference between the film from disuse and the particles of the implosion, the loss, the weary and weeping soul chained to his ribcage and beating, beating, beating.

 _Who would I be without my bow?_ He asked eons ago, joking and meaning it underneath the off-handed smile, and never really thinking he'd find out the answer. Well, he has, and it's this: no one.

But that's who he's always been.

So he looks at his bow in the morning light that ekes its way through the smog and creeps through his window, filtered and yellow and maybe the closest thing he has to warmth now, and makes the choice to leave it there again today.

Rage in his belly, guilt in his heart, Clint thinks that it's not really a choice at all.


End file.
